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How to Live
On my first visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, I wanted to savor the entire experience. I was determined to wake up in time for the 3:15 A.M. Vigils, the first prayers of the day. My room wasn’t in the regular retreatant’s quarters attached to the abbey, but rather on top of a hill overlooking the monastery in what the monks call the Family Guest House. I had to walk about five minutes down the hill to get to the abbey church. One morning I stepped outside my room before dawn and saw an amazing sight. The entire southern edge of the sky was awash in stars. I felt as if I could step inside this doorway of starlight. One of the monks, Brother Paul Quenon, told me later I had been looking into the Milky Way. He pointed to a solitary, bright star suspended in an opposite direction—the planet Venus. Suddenly the reason for waking up that early acquired a whole new dimension. The candlelit prayers in the abbey chapel and the chanting of the Psalms provide a wonderful, soulful entry to the day. So do the magical sights you can behold at that time of morning when much of the world is still asleep.
The 3rd- and 4th-century monks who lived in the desert considered the silence of the night a valuable teacher. Night reminds us that time is passing. Our lives, like days, are finite. Antony, one of the most revered of the desert monks, advised, “Each day when we arise, let’s assume we won’t live until nightfall. And at night, when going to sleep, let’s assume we won’t awaken.” His wasn’t a morbid fascination with death, but a reality check. We have a limited amount of days in which to live, so we might as well wake up and act now. There is important work to do.
If you desire true and eternal life, “keep your tongue free from vicious talk, your lips free from all deceit; turn away from evil and let peace be your quest and aim.” (Ps 34: 14–15).
—FROM THE PROLOGUE
For Benedict, awakening our senses to our physical surroundings is the natural prelude to awakening the heart. In high school, I had a wonderful teacher for freshman English named Margaret Henley. Miss Henley was something of an aspiring poet, as well as the faculty advisor for the school literary magazine and thus a group of us girls who fancied ourselves emerging writers. All writers, she would say, begin as observers. She challenged us one day to recall the eye color of the bus driver who took us to school that morning. I should have known this. I knew the driver’s name. He was a regular along my route. He had even taped a piece of cardboard onto the corner of the bus’s front window that said, scrawled in sparkle ink, “Wishing You A Good Day, Your Driver Sam.” But the color of Sam’s eyes? I could only guess. Blue?
Ever since that day in class, I’ve tried to not only notice, but also truly observe the people I pass in the street, the grocery store, or sit next to on the bus—not to mention the people I interview as a journalist. Still, I fall down on the job. As a young reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, I was sent to write about a man who, over the years, had portrayed Santa for something like ten thousand children. He was a jovial fellow, just about the right size for Santa, with a seemingly inexhaustible well of patience. He appeared to experience deep joy in being around children. He spoke lovingly of his own grown children.
At about eight o’clock that Christmas Eve, the phone rang at my home. It was Joe, the man who played Santa. He was in tears. He told me how much he appreciated the article I had written about him. He thanked me for being so kind to him. Because of my kindness, he wanted me to know it was all a faade. He in fact hated Christmas. His wife had divorced him. His children didn’t talk to him. Every Christmas, he found himself alone. In fact, all the while he was volunteering at hospitals, stores, and children’s parties as Santa, he had been living out of his car because he couldn’t afford an apartment. He said it was all he could do to not think about killing himself as he took off his red Santa suit for the last time of the season.
Why hadn’t I seen any of this coming? How could I, a trained observer, have missed picking up on even an inkling of this man’s pain? I called my parents and told them I’d be late coming over to their home for Christmas Eve dinner. With a friend, I drove over to the part of town where Joe was sitting in his broken down car on that cold December night. We tried to convince him to come back with us to my parent’s house for a meal. He didn’t want to come, but thanked us for spending time with him. You could say my best gift that Christmas Eve was that I woke up.
What is not possible to us by nature, let us ask the Holy One to supply with the help of grace.
—FROM THE PROLOGUE
In his autobiography, Chronicles, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan says one of the greatest influences on his life was his maternal grandmother. She once told him something he never forgot: “Everyone you’ll ever meet is fighting a hard battle.” Joe is a prime example. To truly see Joe, I first had to break out of the tomb of my own self-absorption. I had to climb out from my own battleground so I could see someone else’s “hard battle.”
Joe’s story has a somewhat happy ending. About a year later, I ran into him. He was dressed in a business suit and said that with the help of a social service agency, he was able to scrape together enough money to begin making belts and other leather goods for sale. The business wasn’t exactly booming, but he had customers among the people he met over the many years he had played Santa. St. Benedict asks us to awaken to the whisper of the sacred in our daily lives. And then he asks more. He asks that we wake up to the people around us—to truly see them. In a beautiful scene in the musical version of The Bridges of Madison County, the main character at one point asks her lover to look deeply at her hands, her mouth, her shoulders. She says, “talk to me, like there’s something to say.” One of the greatest gifts we can give to others is to let them know they are seen and heard.
The Benedictine Abbot Jerome Kodell writes about partaking of “the sacrament of the present moment.” That is what I felt I was doing that Christmas Eve with Joe. It is an attitude of awareness I try to cultivate toward the people I meet every day who are fighting their hard battles. It is a way to run with the light, and live.
For Reflection:
4
IS THERE LIFE BEFORE DEATH?
On Living Fully
Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.
—FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS”
I have always had a terrible fear of death. It often grips me in the middle of the night. At those times, I wake seized with the anxiety that I will one day no longer occupy the chair at my work desk, my place at the kitchen table, or my side of the bed.
This fear began at an early age. It may have something to do with having parents who were older when I was born. They looked like my friends’ grandparents. Grandparents had the unfortunate habit of dying. I feared my parents would die and I’d be left alone.
I was also haunted early on by a sense of life’s brevity. One New Year’s Eve as I watched Guy Lombardo’s orchestra on TV with my parents, a band member sang, “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think).” When he got to the line about how the years go by “as quickly as a wink!” I began to weep uncontrollably. I was four years old at the time.
No wonder, then, that when I first began reading The Rule, few passages leaped out at me more than Day by day, remind yourself you are going to die. As an adolescent, I liked characters in literature who refused to sleepwalk through life: Larry Darrell, the spiritual seeker in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge; Eugene Gant, who yearns to leave the emotional confines of his small town and fractured family in Look Homeward, Angel; and of course, the insouciant Zorba the Greek. In a notebook where I kept all my favorite quotations, I dutifully copied Zorba’s observation that, “All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven’t the time to write, and all those who have the time, don’t live them. Do you see?” Yes, I saw. I vowed to both live the mysteries and write.
For a time, as I focused on my writing career, I was able to put aside my fear of death, like a book I’d read and put back on its shelf. Then something happened. My mother died suddenly of a stroke. Death, my old adversary, reannounced itself as the fundamental struggle of my life. It was an adversary my life-loving mother could not overcome, and one I knew no measure of my own will could vanquish either.
What haunted me most about my mother’s death was its suddenness. How could a person who was talking, joking, and enjoying a meal of eggplant parmesan one Sunday no longer exist the next? Walking into my parents’ living room for the first time after my mother’s death, I was overwhelmed by the stillness. The house reeked of silence.
I wondered if her death—or any death—might be easier to cope with if there had been some warning that it was imminent. Or is it better we don’t know it’s the last year, the last week, the last day, and we simply live our lives and love who we love right up to the end?
Hour by hour keep careful watch over all you do, aware that God’s gaze is upon you wherever you may be.
—FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS”
Around the time my mother died, I had another extraordinary experience. I was walking in downtown Chicago when I noticed a police cordon in front of an office tower. I asked a bystander what had happened, and he told me a window had fallen out of the twenty-first floor of the building. It struck a woman who had been walking with her daughter, killing the young mother instantly—as unpredictable a death as you can imagine. Once again, death seemed like some maniacal sharp shooter, randomly picking its targets. I could not stop thinking about that woman. One minute she was walking along Wabash Avenue holding her little girl’s hand, and the next barreling through to the afterlife. It reminded me of a line in “For the Anniversary of My Death” a poem by W.S. Merwin. “Every year without knowing it, we pass the date of our death.”
I thought about the possibility of my own death. How I hoped it would not just show up at my door, a discourteous guest, but drop a note in the mail instead, months or weeks before, as polite company would do. I remembered a character Ben Gazzara played in an old TV drama called Run for Your Life, a lawyer who is told he has six months to live. He spends that time driving across the country, helping complete strangers wherever he stops to find their purpose in life. Maybe I could be like that. I hoped I would have time to tear up my journals, press the clothes in the laundry basket, finish the crossword puzzles on my nightstand, toss out my torn underpants, and apologize for decades of bad behavior before removing the robe of life.
A few years after my mother’s death, when I began spending extended periods at Mount St. Scholastica Monastery, one of the first friends I made was then eighty-nine-year-old Sister Lillian Harrington. I got to know Sister Lillian very well, and felt comfortable enough with her to share my intense fear of dying. One day, I asked her if she ever thought about the moment of death. She drilled her steely blue eyes into mine and told me something I’ve never forgotten. “I don’t think about dying,” she said, “I think about living.”
Living mindfully, looking beyond the obvious—these were things Sister Lillian did, along with drinking strawberry daiquiris and enjoying birthday cake just a few days before she died at the age of ninety-six.
Witnessing the dying, death, and burial of a sister at the Mount was another profound experience. The sisters confront death not begrudgingly, but rather lovingly, tenderly. Unless a sister dies suddenly, or away from the monastery, no one dies alone. The sisters keep a twenty-four hour vigil at the bedside of the dying. They call it “sitting with” the person. As a woman without children of my own and a husband who is nine years older, I sometimes wonder who will be sitting with me.
When the casket returns from the funeral home bearing a sister’s body, every member of the community lines up to meet it, as a bell tolls in the monastery tower. The night before the burial is for storytelling—a time for the community to remember the sister they lost—her gifts, shortcomings, eccentricities, and all.
With one sister carrying high a crucifix, community members march behind the casket the next morning to the cemetery. They stride with purpose and abandon to the gravesite. The first time I witnessed this, I remember thinking, these must be the only truly free people in America.
I don’t think that their fearlessness in the face of death comes solely from their belief in eternal life. As Sister Lillian once said to me, “We don’t know what happens to us after death, we just believe.” I think their equanimity comes from the confidence that each one of them has lived a meaningful life. In the same chapter of The Rule in which Benedict asks us to daily remind ourselves we are going to die, he also gives us a blueprint for how to live:
Pray for your enemies out of love for Christ. If you have a dispute with someone, make peace before the sun goes down. And finally, never lose hope in God’s mercy.
—FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS”
These are things we probably should have been taught in kindergarten.
I once interviewed a member of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, an association of nonbelievers. She happened to be a cancer survivor. She said death is what gives meaning to life. Believing that nothing awaits us beyond this life spurs us to make the most of this life. I think she got it wrong. I believe it is life that gives meaning to death. As Joan Chittister writes, “The fundamental question for a Christian isn’t whether there’s life after death, but whether there’s life before death.”
These days, as I hurtle toward middle age, I’m inspired by the artist Candy Chang. In cities across America, Chang creates interactive art installations that consist of a chalkboard, often placed on the side of a building next to a bucket of colored chalk. Stenciled on the chalkboard is the sentence, “Before I die I want to …” Chang leaves space for people passing by to fill in their response. These are some of the responses people have written:
Before I die I want to:
And one wish that catches in my throat every time I read it:
The philosopher Steve Cave gave a talk a few years ago on National Public Radio’s Ted Radio Hour. His topic was, “Why Are Human Beings Afraid To Die?” Cave spoke of his own fear of death from an early age. It sounded very similar to mine. He said he eventually discovered a new way of thinking about death that helped him with his fear.
“I find it helps to see life as being like a book,” Cave said. “A book is bound by its covers … so our lives are bounded by birth and death.” He continued by saying that the characters in a book know no horizons. They are not afraid of reaching the last chapter, because they only know the moments that make up their story. We humans who are characters in life “need not worry how long our story is, if it’s a comic strip or an epic,” Cave said. “The only thing that matters is that it’s a good story.”
The only thing that matters is that it’s a good story. That is why we keep death daily before our eyes.
There is a beautiful dedication that comes at the beginning of John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden. Steinbeck wrote it for his editor. He likens his book to an exquisitely carved box. What he says about his box, I’d like to say about my life at the end:
“Here is your box. Nearly everything I have is in it … Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad, and evil thoughts and good thoughts … the pleasure of design and some despair … and the indescribable joy of creation. And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you. And still the box is not full.”
This is what the living do. We put everything we have into our life. And on top of it all the gratitude and love we have for one another. May our boxes never empty.
For Reflection:
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